AUTHOR(S): Dr. Dilip Biswas

ABSTRACT:
Mental health is an important aspect of overall well-being because late-adolescent male students at rural colleges face serious psychological, social, and environmental issues. Yoga has become known as a holistic intervention that can enhance mental health by reducing stress and enhancing emotional regulation and self-awareness. This study looked into the effects of a structured 12-week yoga programme on various facets of the mental health of rural college Male in West Bengal. Method: A total of 80 male college students were randomly selected from Purba Medinipur District. They were divided into two groups: the Experimental Group (Gr. EG; n = 40), who practiced yoga and the Control Group (Gr. CG; n = 40), who maintained their usual lifestyle without yoga intervention. The Experimental Group participated in yoga sessions for twelve weeks maintaining yoga schedule. The age of the subjects was 18-22 years. Participants practiced a combination of suryanamaskar, yogasanas, pranayama, and dhyana for 1 hour 15 minutes, three days a week. Mental health was assessed using the Singh and Gupta Mental Health Battery (MHB), which measures six dimensions of mental well-being. The mean, standard deviation and paired t-tests were used to analyze the collected data at the 0.05 level of significance, Results: There was a significant improvement noticed in self-concept (t = 2.63), overall adjustment (t = 2.55) and emotional stability (t = 3.91) after the intervention of yoga training in Group EG. Autonomy increase marginally better in post test, but intelligence, security-insecurity, and autonomy did not cross the significant level. No significant improvements were noticed in Group CG in respect of any dimension of mental health. These results suggest that yoga intervention may be a supportive technique to develop traits that are subject to change, but further wide-ranging or long-lasting interventions may be necessary for more stable traits like security, intelligence and autonomy. Conclusion: a 12-week planned yoga programme can be an available and appropriate way to develop psychological well-being for rural male students, mostly in terms of enhancing self-concept, emotional stability and overall adjustment while the control group showed no meaningful change. Still a longer intervention may be necessary to manipulate more stable features of mental health.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22271/yogic.2022.v7.i2c.1813

Pages: 223-227  |  88 Views  42 Downloads